In Conversation with Aimee Phan

Aimee Phan’s first book, We Should Never Meet, was published in 2004. A linked short story collection, the book tracks the lives of eight characters across three decades and two continents in the aftermath of Operation Babylift, an evacuation of Vietnamese orphans to the U.S. just before the Fall of Saigon. Phan followed up the collection with her novel The Reeducation of Cherry Truong, a multi-generational epic of two families bound by history.

While her first two books were for adults, Phan’s latest offering, The Lost Queen, is a young adult novel with fantasy elements. In this first book in a duology, high school sophomore outsider Jolie Lam befriends “it-girl” Huong Pham. As their connection deepens, they uncover long lost powers and a revelation: ties to the Trung Sisters.

Phan talks to diaCRITICS contributing writer Melina Kritikopoulos about The Lost Queen, her writing career, and the importance of young adult literature.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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Melina Kritikopoulos: Why did you start writing? What inspired you?

Aimee Pham: I spent a lot of time with books when I was growing up. They were my friends. They introduced me to the world, they helped me solve problems, they helped me understand relationships, they helped me understand things going on in the world and how to navigate it. I really trusted books. I trusted authors.

I was excited to be part of that conversation and put my own ideas in it. I think I understand the world and I understand things better when I can write it down. So I think that’s how it started; like rewriting the endings of my favorite fairy tales or taking a character I really liked and thinking “but I want to see them in this adventure.” That helped me think about creating my own worlds and creating my own characters.

When I was at UCLA, I was taking more Asian American history and literature classes and it opened my eyes to a lot of things I didn’t know, that I wasn’t learning about in school. And the way I could process them also was through writing.

Probably one of the most transformational books in my life was No-No Boy by John Okada, because even though it was in the backdrop of the history of the Japanese-American Internment–which I had known about as a history–it came alive to me when I was reading it. I was living it through a character even if it was a fictional character. Literature can be really powerful in that way. Once we care about a character, even if they’re fictional, we suddenly understand the history better. It helps us as readers feel more deeply and understand situations better when we see it through story, through a narrative.

MK: Tell me a bit more about your writing journey. What have you written up to this point?

AP: I wrote two books before The Lost Queen, but they were for adults. They were two books of literary fiction.

One was a collection of short stories called We Should Never Meet. The second book was The Reeducation of Cherry Truong.

Even though these were books that were technically for adults, they revolved around young protagonists. I think young protagonists are compelling to write because they are at an exciting crossroads in their life where they’re right in between childhood and adulthood. Their bodies and minds are growing stronger, they’re on this upward trajectory. They’re also understanding the world isn’t as innocent as they thought. They’re having to make decisions that they haven’t before. It’s also about deciding who you want to be as a person and what role you want to play in your community, which are two really important choices that humans have to make in their lives.

It seemed natural to then move into young adult literature. I teach at an arts college where I have students who are mostly visually-based learners–they’re artists and designers– and I was having challenges getting them to read the books in my class. Even though they are lovely people and always came to class, they weren’t motivated to read always. But when I started teaching young adult literature, they would read all the books. I remember wondering about this: “Why was it so much easier for them to read young adult literature than any other genre?” It’s because these books are often the most important books in their lives. They remember them better than any other book because like me, these books were their friends. These books were their companions when they were trying to understand the world.

Now that I’m writing in the genre, there are things that appear in young adult literature that just feel immediately engaging, they’re faster. You need to start fast. Not that I don’t enjoy a slow book, some of my favorite books are incredibly slow, but there’s something really captivating about the young adult literary genre. Readers can recognize tropes and pick up on them but they’re also written in ways that are incredibly fresh and new and innovative.

MK: Did you always feel drawn to writing about Vietnamese culture and heritage?

AP: There were no Vietnamese American characters when I was a kid. And I missed them. I think it’s actually incredibly important for young people to see themselves in literature. If you don’t see yourself in literature, you don’t feel part of the community, you don’t feel part of this world. I, like many other children of color, had to adapt. We had to pretend that we could identify with all the white characters we were reading. It’s like they’re this blank canvas that we can put our emotions on. And then when we see characters of color, our response immediately is like, “Oh, it’s different!” But it actually is not so much.

I remember when I was little, whenever I would find a Vietnamese character or an Asian American character in a book I would immediately light up. I would just watch them so carefully and I would just be so excited to see how they navigated the world. Like, there’s a Vietnamese character in a Judy Blume book, and I just love that. I love that she’s there. She is sweet, she is kind, she is smart, she is popular and I was like “Oh my god! This is amazing.”

When I was in college there weren’t, again, that many Vietnamese American novels or books. I remember when I was writing stories, it wasn’t even a deliberate thing, I wouldn’t identify the character’s race in a story. I remember my teacher David Wong Louie, called this out to me. He said, “Why don’t you just say it? That’s actually the most interesting part of your writing. Your characters are part of this community, this world, and they happen to be Vietnamese American.” He gave me a lot of confidence in calling me out that way in terms of being comfortable writing about characters and families and communities that are part of me.

Once I started doing it, it just felt so right. It felt like I didn’t want to write about anything else. I felt like this was my material, this was my world, this was what I wanted to spend time in: creating characters who were incredibly different from each other and happened to be Vietnamese who are affected by the histories and the social structures of being in the Vietnamese diaspora and could still be funny, could still be smart, could still make mistakes, could still make terrible decisions, could be cruel, could be full of regret. That was really important to me to be able to do. As I get older, I want to keep living in this world.

MK: I notice that almost all the characters in The Lost Queen are multifaceted, as you mention. They’re almost all Vietnamese American and they all have different strengths and weaknesses. Can you tell me more about how you came up with the plot, incorporating the story of the Trung Sisters?

AP: I was always fascinated by the Trung Sisters. There are Vietnamese queens, right? There isn’t that much fiction written about them. There are temples, there are parades, there are statues, there are historical documents. But in terms of a fictional story, or a retelling, I haven’t seen that many of them. I thought it was something I wanted to explore and I wanted to live in. I also never had a sister before, and I think sisterhood is interesting because, in a way, it’s a lifelong intense female friendship—to have another person who you can navigate through this world with, who has gone through your own experiences, who you can rely on.

I was also fascinated by the idea that they only ruled for three years and then they suddenly disappeared. The initial question when I started the book was, “What would have happened if they hadn’t died? What would have happened if they had come back? What if they lived in this world, right now? What would they have to say?” Once you do that, once you reincarnate the Trung Sisters–these ancient Vietnamese queens–into these teenagers who live in San Jose, I’ve already entered the fantasy world. The door already opened. I had no limitations in terms of reality. That was really freeing.

I understand now why so much of young adult literature is fantasy because young people, and people in general, don’t like to be told that can’t happen. But in fantasy, anything can happen as long as it’s written well. Anything can happen.

MK: Can you tell me more about the writing of the novel? How did you decide to include time travel, mythic retellings, etc?

AP: When I took Asian American Literature at UCLA, which was probably 25 years ago, there was not that much. The two big Asian American classes they had at UCLA were pre-1980 and post-1980. The book Dogeaters by Jessica Hagedorn was taught in the post-1980 [class] and it blew my mind in terms of what you could do with narrative structure. Most books I had read before were linear [with] occasional flashbacks. As a writer, I love flashbacks. I’m a pastiche writer. And Jessica Hagedorn, the way she writes her stories–she had revolving narrators, she had newspaper clippings, she had radio announcements, she had soap opera transcripts. It was awesome. And you don’t necessarily have to keep track of it, you kind of just let it enter you. And then she’ll return to certain aspects, so it becomes this circular story. I didn’t know storytelling could do that.

I think, more and more, the way we read, the way we interpret social media, we have a very interrupted, fragmented, fractured narrative that exists. I have always loved that kind of storytelling that isn’t just this one smooth long story. I don’t know if I’ll ever write that actually. If you look at my two other books–my first collection was linked stories, and they also went back in time where we would go from the present day to the past in Vietnam. They were short stories and they were standalone. I always say that that collection of stories was my cheater’s way of writing a novel.

Novels are really hard to write, which is why it takes me so long. You’re keeping track of every little thing. With short stories, I treated them like standalone chunks, but I had the freedom and the luxury of being able to bring characters back from past stories, or make references, without being accountable for every single detail. I did the same thing in my novel, where I had like 8 narrators–all different characters in one family.

I approached the young adult novel in a very similar way as I’ve done with those two books. I like being able to go into different character’s point of views. I like seeing how different narrators talk to each other and how readers get to catch clues in the myths and the present story. What I think is fun is that when you’re reading the myths, you don’t know what Jolie has already read, but you as the reader do. I think readers like to be smarter than the main characters, it makes them feel good. That’s what I was trying to do with the myths. They were fun because you don’t know who exactly is talking to you in the myths. Then you realize it’s actually someone we know. I love when books reveal something later, and then you can reread it and have better knowledge. Storytelling can be so interesting that way. That’s what makes me really nerdy about it so I like how the myths have that relationship and how Jolie has a relationship with these older stories. It also reflects on how we have a relationship with our ancestors that way, with our past. [Our ancestors] can’t talk to us anymore, but they can talk to us through words, they can talk to us through these stories.

MK: Along with myths, I notice that water–arguably a very Vietnamese image–is very prominent in the novel. Was that a conscious choice? How did that come about?

AP: I do think Vietnamese people love water, but we also have a complicated relationship with it, like we’ve got the boat people, we’ve got the ocean. It’s huge, it’s complicated. But there’s a reason why all the Vietnamese people flock to California. There is something about looking at the water. For me, it’s my favorite landscape by far. I feel better. It does make me feel at home. It is vast. There’s so much going on in the ocean. But it inspires fear, fascination, awe, wonder, all the things we know but cannot know.

Water also cleanses us. Water makes us feel better once we’re underneath it. I think I began to love the theme of water in the book the more I wrote about it. Because you’re right. The reason why I started with water was I made Jolie a swimmer. I needed her to do something. And I knew that it was going to be this weird encounter in the water. Since I made her a swimmer, it made sense for her to keep returning to it.

This happens to me a lot: when I’m working on a scene and it’s taking me a long time and I don’t know why, and then I figure out, “Oh, this is why.” We return to the pool. It becomes a major theme and I’m excited it happened. When I first was writing, I didn’t have this and now I’m like, “I’m going to have to rewrite so much more.” Because it’s going to center around this. The water becomes a place for her to return to memories, and to regenerate. I think I feel that way too.

Water was really important to my dad. He didn’t know how to swim. When I first was learning how to swim, as a kid in Irvine, my dad would take the adult lessons. I would be sitting there in my children’s lessons learning how to swim and I would be looking over to the other side and my dad would be taking lessons as an adult. That has always stayed with me, the importance of that.

I was raised Catholic. Water is really important in terms of rebirth and regeneration. My mother believes in the healing power of water. When we were little, we went twice to the Lourdes Sanctuary in France. It’s a very Catholic place where they believe that the water is holy and can heal you. When I was little, my mom took us there and said, “This water can heal you from all your ailments.” I believed so much back then. I was like, “Why doesn’t everyone come here/everyone can get healed!” I would see people come with clear disabilities or injuries and I would just want to watch them because I would be like, “They’re going to go into the waters and they’re going to come back healed.” It was a really magical element for me.

MK: This book is strongly rooted in Northern California and the Bay Area. What elicited that choice?

AP: My first two books are set in Southern California. I did very much write those because I wanted books set in Little Saigon. I started writing those stories when I was going to grad school in Iowa and I think it’s because I missed California. When you leave, you realize how good you had it. Like I missed those things. I lived 15 minutes from the beach my entire life and we barely went to the beach, and I was like, “Why didn’t we go there way more than we did?” I developed this appreciation, this love, this nostalgia for it. You write where you want to be sometimes. You write what you want to think about, you write about the landscape that you care about.

I have lived in the Bay Area now since 2007 and there is a big Asian American, Vietnamese American community here, too. And I wanted to set the book here. Also, my daughter was very young at the time. She’s 16 and a half now, she’s like the age of Jolie. I wanted to set a book where my kids grew up.

The two main inspirations for writing the book were definitely the Trung Sisters, but it was also about what young teenagers are facing now, which I feel like is incredible pressure especially Silicon Valley. When I first started writing it, we were hearing about all these mental health issues happening with teenagers. Just terrible. I was making a connection between those two. That’s why I made Jolie go through such a hard time at the beginning, made her feel so isolated. I think young readers relate. I wanted to set it in a particular place where, teenagers are growing up being so aware of success, the pressures of success and having to achieve so much, I wanted to capture that kind of energy. That was why it was really important for me to have them growing up in a Silicon Valley school. To have everyone achieving around you and her feeling just so low.

The fog was really important to me too, the fog of Northern California. It becomes this character in these books, too. It becomes this magical, mystical thing that also relates, when you think about Vietnam and the mountains there. There is something also really cleansing about it, it’s water in the air.

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